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Life

What’s shaking down on the farm…

Whilst dealing with many interruptions, the PCT/IPC improvements to my company’s product are nearly ready to go live. Sometime this week, we’ll start storing international patents in our datastore, with fully hooked-up classifications. It’ll be flippin’ neat-o! With the back-end (importing, deciphering, parsing, storing) improvements done, next comes the front-end enhancements. (“Oh! A publication number can now have that format?”) Then everything magically falls into place. That’s the plan. 🙂

At work, I monitor our codebase’s size using cloc. I take monthly snapshots. I like how our LOC have remained roughly the same, while we add new features and fix bugs. I visualize the codebase becoming tighter and firmer, as we weed out and replace bad code with code doing more work with fewer lines. I enjoy the visualization, and there are grains of truth within. I’ve come across code I wrote months ago, and I say, “Gah! I could use a list comprehension there and save three statements!” Or something similar. All things being equal, fewer lines of code and/or fewer source code statements equals fewer bugs.

A friend of mine went through three Mozilla phone screens. Everything was sounding positive. Then…silence. For over a month now. He’s wondering where common courtesy went.

AT&T Wireless wouldn’t let us upgrade an iPhone 3GS to a 4S without a $250 penalty. We had 11 weeks left on the phone contract, and we’ve been their customers for 15 years. In related news, AT&T Wireless can go to hell.